Thanks for stopping in. This will be my first ever tutorial. I hope more will follow and will be helpful. Even more so I hope they are clear and easy to understand. If you find anything unclear, please drop me a line and let me know.
I am going to deal with modeling terrains in the Terrain Editor to make mountains like the ones in the image above. It's simple and quick to do. So lets get started!!
Step #1
With a blank canvas in Bryce, start with creating a Terrain from the create menu (hold down the ctrl key while you create it so the material is flat grey). With the Terrain selected, click the Edit
icon. This will thrust you in to the Terrian Editor =TE.
Your Terrain is defaulted at a 128x128 size grid. This yeilds faster render times, but lacks in details/quality of the look of the terrain. So we are going to start by changing the resolution of the terrain. Click the Grid box in the TE window and select 256 (see fig. 1).
fig. 1
Next, put your mouse cursor over the sphere next to the "Posterize"effect (fig 2).
fig. 2
Your Cursor should turn into a two-sided arrow. Now Left click, HOLD and drag your mouse to the RIGHT. Watch the preview window as you do this. At this point it is hard to say just how much to slide it. But for this tutorial, go until you have your terrain with about 6-10 or so levels of grey. See the sample below. (Don't fear if you make a mistake, you can type ctrl+z and undo the last action).
When you have this to your liking, click the OK Checkmark.
Your preview terrain should look something like this in levels of grey.
Step #2
You should now be back to the main Bryce screen. Although you have a stepped terrain, there are some things here I prefer to tidy up. There will be a lot of rough edges here. Do a quick render of your mountain at this point and you will see what I mean.OK, exit the render view (esc) and go back to the TE
.Just like creating the posterized terrain, we are going to smooth this one a touch. Place your cursor over the blue sphere next to Smooth. LEFT click and Hold and slide to the right. NOT TOO MUCH (my mouse moves about an inch)! You just want to see your preview begin to blur slightly. If you do it too much you can lose the steps all together. (though playing with this can produce other nice effects). Once you see a slight blur to your greyscale image, release your mouse button.
While still in the TE, click the Grid Icon again and select 512-ultra-fine. Now repeat the Posterize effect. You shouldn't see a lot of change in this one as far as levels. But I find this gives you more small details. When satisfied, back to the Grid and make the terrain 1024. Optional: You can use the clipping tool to get rid of the large square ground surrounding the terrain at this point (needed if your terrain will sit in any water). See fig. #3 below.
Click OK.
Drag the white clipping bracket up from the bottom until the black turns dark red.
Step #3
Well, you made it this far. Isn't it just so fun!? Now the hard part..lol. Adding mats ;-). Thats really not hard, but getting the right materials for an image is paramount. I have seen (and produced) well laidout scenes, only to have the materials really take away from the final image. For these type of terrains, since they show a lot of weather wear, I tend to stay away from harsh, grainy materials. I try to use something that has plenty of smooth areas in the bump. To reflect the wear to the rock.To see some of these terrains used in another image, check out my Escort Through Helix Cayon image.
Now just produce about 4-10 terrains and scatter them about the scene. The image on top was made with 5 terrains. 1 of those used for the ground plane, stetched to fill all gaps in the forground. Some tweaking on the sky, atmosphere and there you have it. Never fear to experiment with this stuff. All you can gain from that is knowledge.
After adding a material, and a water material to the ground plane, you should have something along these lines.
If you are feeling adventurous, While on your last step in the TE, while the grid is at 512, try adding a slight "Erode" to the terrain. Just enough to show some eroded lines. Here would be the result to the terrain above...
Final Tips
Play with the sky and shadows a lot. The suns position can make a HUGE difference in the final image. Since shadows are a big part of nature. Also, experiment with stretching terrains. The farthest left terrain in the sample up top is a terrain stretched quite a bit to make it take up more space.The choices are endless. I have tried anything I can think of at least once. If it looks good I do it a lot more, it looks bad, I try it one more time just to make sure it was lame! LOL.
Hope you found this useful. Feel free to save the webpage to your PC for future use. Feel free to send it to a friend. Just keep it all intact and make no changes. Let me know if I missed anything, or if you have a suggestion to improve this.
Keep on Bryce'n! Have a good day ;-)
All images ©2000-2003 Bruce Holderbaum/ HSI Graphics. May not be reposted on the www without my permission.